The Golden Bowl - Henry James [120]
Their conveyance, as she spoke, stopped at their door, and it was on the spot another fact of value for her that her husband, though seated on the side by which they must alight, made no movement. They were in a high degree votaries of the latch-key, so that their household had gone to bed; and as they were unaccompanied by a footman the coachman waited in peace. It was so indeed that for a minute Bob Assingham waited – conscious of a reason for replying to this address otherwise than by the so obvious method of turning his back. He didn’t turn his face, but stared straight before him, and his wife had already gathered from the fact of his not moving all the proof she could desire – proof, that is, of her own contention. She knew he never cared what she said, and his neglect of his chance to show it was thereby the more eloquent. ‘Leave it,’ he at last remarked, ‘to them.’
‘ “Leave it”–?’ She wondered.
‘Let them alone. They’ll manage.’
‘They’ll manage, you mean, to do everything they want? Ah there then you are!’
‘They’ll manage in their own way,’ the Colonel almost cryptically repeated.
It had its effect for her: quite apart from its light on the familiar phenomenon of her husband’s indurated conscience, it gave her full in her face the particular evocation of which she had made him guilty. It was wonderful, truly then, the evocation. ‘So cleverly – that’s your idea? – that no one will be the wiser? It’s your idea that we shall have done all that’s required of us if we simply protect them?’
The Colonel, still in his place, declined however to be drawn into a statement of his idea. Statements were too much like theories, in which one lost one’s way; he only knew what he said, and what he said represented the limited vibration of which his confirmed old toughness had been capable. Still, none the less, he had his point to make – for which he took another instant. But he made it for the third time in the same fashion. ‘They’ll manage in their own way.’ With which he got out.
Oh yes, at this, for his companion, it had indeed its effect, and while he mounted their steps she but stared, without following him, at his opening of their door. Their hall was lighted, and as he stood in the aperture looking back at her, his tall lean figure outlined in darkness and with his crush-hat, according to his wont, worn cavalierly, rather diabolically, askew, he seemed to prolong the sinister emphasis of his meaning. In general, on these returns, he came back for her when he had prepared their entrance; so that it was now as if he were ashamed to face her in closer quarters. He looked at her across the interval, and, still in her seat, weighing his charge, she felt her whole view of everything flare up. Wasn’t it simply what had been written in the Prince’s own face beneath what he was saying? – didn’t it correspond with the mocking presence there that she had had her troubled glimpse of? Wasn’t, in fine, the pledge that they would ‘manage in their own way’ the thing he had been feeling for his chance to invite her to take from him? Her husband’s tone somehow fitted Amerigo’s look – the one that had for her so strangely peeped from behind over the shoulder of the one in front. She hadn’t then read it – but wasn’t she reading it when she now saw in it his surmise that she was perhaps to be squared? She wasn’t to be squared, and while she heard her companion call across to her ‘Well, what’s the matter?’ she also took time to remind herself that she had decided she couldn’t be frightened. The ‘matter’? – why it was sufficiently the matter, on all this, that she felt a little sick. For it wasn’t the Prince she had been prepared to regard as primarily the shaky one. Shakiness in Charlotte she had at the most perhaps postulated – it would be, she somehow felt, more easy to deal with. Therefore if he had come so far it was a different pair of sleeves. There was nothing to choose between them. It made her so helpless that, as the time passed without her alighting,